34. O Come, All Ye Faithful

The Story Behind the Hymn

The Latin hymn ‘Adeste Fideles,’ translated into English as ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful,’ is generally attributed to John Francis Wade, an English Catholic layman. He worked as a professional music copyist in the city of Douai in northern France, then a major center for English Catholics living in voluntary or enforced exile.

Catholic worship remained heavily restricted during this period, and in some periods outright illegal, back in England itself, following the Protestant Reformation and subsequent political upheavals of the seventeenth century.

Wade earned his living largely by hand-copying music manuscripts, for use in exiled Catholic communities and seminaries across continental Europe. Surviving manuscript copies of this hymn in his own handwriting, several bearing his personal decorative flourishes, date from the 1740s.

Those copies provide the earliest solid evidence of the text’s existence, and its likely connection to Wade specifically, rather than to any of several other candidates sometimes proposed by hymnologists over the years.

Some historians have suggested, based on close textual and contextual analysis, that the Latin text may have carried a deliberate coded political meaning for its original, politically sensitive exile-community audience. In this reading, the word ‘Bethlehem’ functions as a veiled reference to England itself, the true homeland its Catholic Jacobite readers had been forced to leave, and ‘the faithful’ refers specifically to exiled supporters of the deposed Stuart royal line, rather than to Christian believers generally.

This intriguing theory remains genuinely debated among scholars, however, rather than firmly established as documented historical fact. Other historians consider it an overreading of what may simply be a conventional devotional text.

The hymn was translated into its now-standard English form in 1841, by Frederick Oakeley, an Anglican priest closely associated with the Oxford Movement. Oakeley himself later followed a path similar to John Henry Newman’s, whose story appears in hymn 99, and converted to Roman Catholicism several years after completing his translation.

Despite — or perhaps in an odd way because of — its murky, possibly politically coded origins among exiled English Catholics centuries earlier, the hymn has since become one of the most universally recognized and widely sung Christmas hymns across nearly every denominational line. It is performed today in Catholic and Protestant churches alike, by congregations almost entirely unaware of its possibly politically charged eighteenth-century beginnings.